Metal Oxide Gas Sensors: Fundamentals and Applications

Dear Colleagues,

The need for gas sensors is growing exponentially, driven by the development of new application areas, such as connected objects (IoT), e-health, smart city and smart home projects, etc. Metal oxide semiconductors (MOX) are widely studied and have been used as sensing layers for gas sensors for more than 50 years. The exceptional potential of MOX sensors arises from their sensitivity to a wide variety of gases, their small size and weight, their reduced fabrication costs, and their compatibility with microelectronics technology. However, these devices suffer from poor selectivity and rather high energy consumption, prompting researchers to look for different strategies to overcome these drawbacks. Essentially, two types of strategies are being developed to improve the selectivity of MOX sensors: strategies acting at the sensitive layer level (oxide composition, nanocomposites, n-type/p-type heterojunctions, catalytic overlayer, etc.) and strategies using signal and data processing associated with artificial intelligence (multivariate analysis, fluctuation enhanced sensing, temperature modulation, machine learning, deep learning, etc.). One of the challenges of the data-driven approach is to increase the amount of information provided by MOX gas sensors  in order to create real-time databases that can be processed by advanced algorithms. Another persisting and insufficiently studied challenge is the interference caused by changes in relative humidity, which can result in responses that are indistinguishable from those of the analyte gas.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to obtain an overview of recent developments on fundamental and applied aspects of these topics (but submissions are not limited to the aforementioned topics), and we invite authors to contribute high-quality original research papers and review articles.

Prof. Jean-Luc Seguin
Dr. Thierry Contaret
Guest Editors

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